Drive-by Saviours

by Chris Benjamin

  “I just called to see how you are,” I said. If I ploughed forward she would figure it out.

  “I’m fine,” Michelle said. She took a deep nasal breath. “Tired. What time is it there?” She had granted me the small victory of recognition.

  That first conversation in five years was miraculous and short. Fifteen hundred days of bitter cancerous rage had marched over one territory of my brain after another and obscured the good things about Michelle: her wit, her sprawling laugh, her ideas and excitement. It was like old times, the rare good ones when we made fun of our parents and conservative politicians, especially the local anti-intellectual nuts who made the news for shooting at teenagers on their property and other absurd antics. We reminisced more than we updated. We agreed that Mother and our stepfather hadn’t changed since our respective departures.

  I had to cut the dream sequence short because I was calling long distance from work.

  “Will you catch shit for this call?” Michelle asked.

  “I usually give shit for this sort of thing,” I said, proud of my practically managerial status.

  “You must get that from Mother,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “But I really should go.”

  “Okay,” she said. “It was nice talking to you.”

  I agreed and we said goodbye. She didn’t ask for my number. She didn’t say to call again. I didn’t even mention the word ‘obsession.’

  FORTY HOURS IN FOUR DAYS AT THE FORTY-NINTH IN CHAPTER 20

  Under a bridge in uptown Toronto, Bumi woke Lady Juanita with a broad-faced grin. “Hello, Miss,” he said. “Can I shake your hand?”

  From the warmth of her sleeping bag Lady Juanita returned Bumi’s intent gaze. “How do you know I have hands?” she asked.

  Bumi explained that he had in fact seen Lady Juanita’s hands many times. They moved over chessboards in the park in a flurry of simultaneous victories over regulars and passers-by.

  Lady Juanita flashed a patchwork toothy grin, flecked with silver and decay. “Oh, you’ve seen me play. Well, okay. Do you play?”

  Bumi shook his head.

  “Do you want to learn?”

  Bumi explained that he won the annual chess tournament six years running in school.

  “So, you do play?”

  Bumi shook his head again. “Not anymore.”

  Lady Juanita tilted her head and pulled her magical hands from her sleeping bag. “You want to shake my hand?” she asked. She held her hands in front of Bumi’s face.

  He nodded.

  “If you can beat me,” she said, “you can shake them both.”

  Bumi shook his head once more. “I don’t think I can beat you,” he said. “I have saw you play. No one can beat you.”

  Lady Juanita, oblivious to Bumi’s sincere compliment, reached into the worn backpack next to her sleeping bag, pulled out a beautiful hand-carved chess set and began arranging the brown and white pieces. “What colour do you want, Sir?” she asked.

  “Brown,” Bumi said.

  Lady Juanita advanced her queen’s pawn. Bumi took a seat on the cold grass on his side of the board. A thin layer of fresh snow covered the earth except under the bridge. While Bumi considered his opening move, Lady Juanita asked him about his origins.

  “Indonesia,” Bumi answered. He stared at the board. “Rilaka. Small island near big one.”

  “Ahh,” Lady Juanita said. “Megawati’s child.”

  Bumi knew from his co-workers that the daughter of Indonesia’s first president had replaced Abdurrahman Wahid, who had replaced Habibie who had replaced Bumi’s former dictator after the 1998 reformasi. His housemate co-workers kept him well apprised of the situation and they, the waitresses and the chefs, occasionally talked politics while they worked, as long as no Chang was around. The restaurant was a hotbed of political animals in exile. Among them Bumi felt tame. He’d never been an activist and he’d always been careful to hide his views. Most of his fellow dishwashers had committed some kind of crime of expression or physical protest before escaping arrest or death. Bumi was a special case.

  After the revolutionary riots that ousted the dictator, the Changs wondered if their source of Indonesian labour had supplied its last bodies. Freedom and democracy were theoretically bad for the human smuggling business. Fortunately for the Changs, thirty-two years of corruption, poverty, nepotism and repression don’t fade with even two hundred million marked Xs in ballot boxes across the islands.

  “Actually, Suharto’s child,” Bumi said. He still stared at the chessboard. “I left in 1996.”

  For twenty-three minutes Lady Juanita lectured Bumi about the ill-fated Dutch East Indies. She began by discussing CIA influence over Sukarno, the first president, and his sympathy for the Soviets. From there she diverted to Lenin’s reluctant legalization of divorce and abortion, and Stalin’s later reversal of this policy. Back to Indonesia, Lady Juanita provided a brief comparative history of how women fared under Javanese hierarchy, followed by Islamic law, Dutch colonialism to the beginning of the women’s movement and their role in combat and developing an Indonesian press.

  Bumi moved his right-side rook’s pawn and Lady Juanita countered with a bishop’s pawn. Bumi stared at the board. Lady Juanita returned to her lecture.

  She credited a combination of historical factors for the rise of a woman to the role of president: the prehistorically strong role of women, Indo-Islam’s strong protection of and call for respect for women, a strong European-influenced women’s movement, a proportional representation voting system and the fact that she was Sukarno’s daughter.

  Which brought Lady Juanita back to how the elected officials of the United States of America betrayed Sukarno when they became afraid of his socialist sympathies, and had a million of his alleged comrades murdered. It fascinated Bumi to hear this alternate version of his nation’s history.

  “Where are you from?” Bumi asked, eyes firm on the board.

  Lady Juanita told him about her brief memories of El Salvador, mangoes, passion fruit, chess and forced oral sex on an American missionary. “Never trust any man who claims he speaks for God,” she warned Bumi, who moved another pawn.

  Lady Juanita brought out another knight. Bumi stared at the board.

  The game started at 7:30 AM and was still incomplete at 2:30 PM when Bumi had to go to work. “Can we finish tomorrow?” Bumi asked.

  Lady Juanita took a last look at the board and scooped it into her knapsack along with the remaining pieces. She had the advantage, but it was slight.

  “I guess we will start a new game,” Bumi said.

  “Sure,” Lady Juanita said. “But first we must finish this one.”

  “But the pieces are not in order now,” Bumi said.

  Lady Juanita pointed at her temple. “The order is up in here,” she said, smiling her holy smile. “See you tomorrow. If I’m not here I’ll be at the park.” She stuffed her sleeping bag into her knapsack and strutted toward the nearby park.

  The next morning Bumi woke Lady Juanita at seven-thirty and they played until the game ended just before noon. Lady Juanita won. She never broke stride in her words or paused to think about a move. “Congratulations!” she said, extending her hand. “That was the longest game I have ever won.”

  Bumi squeezed Lady Juanita’s hand in his own raw, bare hand, and smiled. “Thank you,” he said. “You are the best player.”

  BUMI’S INTERNAL CIRCUITRY WENT INTO OVERDRIVE AFTER HE left Lady Juanita. He cast his memory back to Pram and Arum in the Makassar market and marvelled again at the immense humanity of society’s castaways. Pram and Arum were as human as any teacher, engineer or social scientist Bumi could imagine—maybe more so. But Lady Juanita was different from them despite her similar lifestyle. She had the same megalomaniacal arrogance of the most successful busi
ness tycoon or slickest administrator. Yet she emitted a nauseating odour and spewed the most ill-contrived and hateful conspiracy theories Bumi had ever heard.

  Or maybe it was Bumi who was different from his boyhood self, the one who had befriended the ex-mother and ex-soldier so long ago. Maybe they stank of the same arrogance and BO and he had never noticed or cared. The whole time Bumi played chess he fought the smell, which he knew rode a wave of bacteria into his body.

  Lady Juanita’s congratulatory grip was strong. It crushed the accumulated dirt of ten thousand road miles into the raw cracked skin of Bumi’s hands. The dirt carried who knows what parasites from far south and far north.

  He tried to remember what Dr. Cherian told him, that his reason failed him even though it knew the irrationality of his fears and doubts. “Not knowing,” she had said, “is your real problem, and you can never know. You can never know for sure that you are safe from bacteria, that you will make it to work on time, and that is what your mind is unable to accept. That is what we must teach your mind to accept.” She did not say anything about accepting that he may never be reunited with his family.

  Bumi tried to channel his bacterial anxieties toward better understanding Lady Juanita as a human being, but all he could see was an angel fallen from the highest of heights into the dirtiest of depths and dementia. Whatever Lady Juanita had, Bumi was sure to catch it. After the first hand-shake Bumi broke down and washed his hands as best he could in the short twenty minutes before his shift, thus failing Dr. Cherian’s challenge. He made a mockery of her exposure with response prevention technique.

  Dr. Cherian had told Bumi, in her aristocratic British accent with just a hint remaining of her Indian heritage, that they would attack the symptom first and the root second because there was not and never would be enough proof for him that he was safe from infection. “It is impossible to know anything for certain in this world,” she told Bumi. “What we need to address is your desire to wash, to count and to check.”

  The process began with a cooperative effort between Bumi and Dr. Cherian to perform a complete diagnostic on his rituals. This investigation was in itself borderline obsessive, but she explained that it was necessary to figure out his triggers and find new means for dealing with them. They started with childhood, and Bumi once again found himself in the role of storyteller, sparing few details.

  In most cases he had trouble explaining the origin of his rituals. He knew they were necessary but he didn’t always know why. Explaining the significance of three was easy, thirty-three made slightly less sense when he tried to express it aloud, and not stepping on bad spots and other peculiar body movements seemed absurd on close examination.

  Once he had verbally explored some of his rituals, the next step was mapping them out on paper, which involved completing a series of self-monitoring forms on which Bumi had his friends transcribe his observations of his own behaviour. He focused on three behaviours: washing, checking and counting. Bumi tracked the times he performed his rituals, how long they took and the thoughts that provoked them, and he scored the level of stress he felt at the time.

  Bumi called me at all hours of the night with his observations, asking me to write them down. After a week or two I asked Dr. Cherian if there was a better way. It was then she forced him to write. “In whatever language you want,” she said.

  Bumi forced himself to write with every iota of his will. He covered both sides of his forms with notes, explanations, corrections and footnotes. He recorded his activities minute by minute. He noted most of these mentally at work and wrote out his every activity deep into the night. The results were illegible to most, but enlightening for Bumi because from them a few precious patterns emerged. He could see clearly how stressful encounters, particularly with the Changs and with pollution, increased the frequency of his compulsions.

  The next step was forced exposure. Bumi had to break all his lifelong self-imposed taboos. For Bumi, breaking a taboo meant that the world could crash down, and if life seemed hard before it was nothing to what the universe and gods would do to punish him for messing with the agreed-upon rituals. Dr. Cherian claimed to understand this, to know how hard it was, to have seen it done before, and she urged Bumi to let her escort him around the city to meet not one but as many homeless people as possible to shake their hands.

  Sarah was appalled when she learned the manifestation of this therapeutic approach. Bumi was to expose himself by way of a handshake to the greatest source of infection and filth the world has ever known: human beings. Not just any human beings, but the ones most likely to carry diseases, germs, viruses, unhealthy bacteria and dirt. “But they are still people,” Sarah said. “You can’t just use them as therapy tools.”

  Bumi remained enthusiastic, optimistic and unburdened by Sarah’s ethical constraints. In his mind, this experiment was an opportunity to reconnect with his childhood history. He had passed the Toronto homeless countless times by bicycle and on foot and never once offered them a coin, a nod or eye contact, let alone the chance to sell a story for a good price.

  Bumi’s therapy was not only an opportunity for him to take control of his life for the first time, it also afforded Lady Juanita the chance to set her own price for a hand-shake. She was gracious and lowered the price when Bumi couldn’t beat her at chess.

  Bumi had, in his usual fashion, forged a path around the typical. Ignoring a well-trodden route fraught with ethical compromise, he refused Dr. Cherian’s accompaniment and made a new friend, who happened to revolt him on a physical level.

  Undeterred, Bumi challenged Lady Juanita to a rematch. Once again he struggled to keep his mind in three places at once: on the game (always planning thirteen moves in advance), on Lady Juanita’s rambling narratives through giant leaps of logic in an infinite landscape of knowledge, and on a bombardment of filth at a psychic level. After five hours the rematch was placed on hold while Bumi went to work. He scored a minor victory: with unprecedented self-discipline he resisted the urge to wash before his shift. He slipped his hands into his gloves and did not wash again until he got home from work. His mind screamed horrible fears all the way through.

  An even greater victory came when Lady Juanita finally toppled his king the following day and shook Bumi’s hand in rigorous congratulations. “That was even longer than the first time!” she said. Again Bumi followed Dr. Cherian’s rules and denied himself fulfillment of his desperate desire to wash until shift’s end.

  All this disciplined denial left Bumi with an itch across and throughout his body. He was almost certain that parasites were eating him alive and probably everyone who ate off the plates he touched too. At least he had Dr. Cherian to blame if he was called to account for a dead, mostly white upper class.

  At home Bumi moved his alarm clock to the corner of his room opposite his bed and had Bang tuck him in so tightly that getting up to check the alarm would be a monumental struggle. Bang served with the Indonesian military for twelve years before he defected, and was left with an infallible internal alarm clock. As a result of the tight tucking in, Bumi lay motionless all night, convinced that the alarm would fail him and he would be fired and his family killed because of his failure to repay his debt. These were the things Dr. Cherian couldn’t understand. Some of the consequences Bumi feared were very real.

  An angry-faced sketch of him stared down from the ceiling. He stared into his own eyes. He struggled to find something to believe in that might make him less angry.

  On Dr. Cherian’s advice, Bumi implored Bang to wake him up should his alarm fail, even though it never had. Bang was also enlisted to take Bumi on morning strolls, during which Bumi was forced to step on cracks while telling Bang about his earliest memories of obsessive-compulsive behaviours.

  Bang was a quiet sturdy man, and one of the best unpaid listeners Bumi had ever met. With each crack-bound step Bang would pose gentle questions, which whether by d
esign or fluke distracted Bumi from his thirty-three recitations. Bumi had become adept at reciting names or phrases while carrying on a conversation, but Bang’s curious questions probed a deeper part of his brain and being and gave him the rare task of expressing long-withheld feelings.

  In the seven years Bang and the other Indonesian illegals had known Bumi, he had told them almost nothing about himself. Their curiosity had mounted and multiplied during those years. Bang was finally able to gain some understanding of their strange compatriot, who was so intelligent yet so absent of mind.

  By the end of a walk on a cobblestone path Bumi had racked up so many penalties that he could not even calculate how many recitations he owed the universe.

  One of the results of all this forced denial was that Bumi’s already limited allocation of sleeping hours depleted until he became unfocused, erratic and confused. It was then that his ongoing chess matches with Lady Juanita became livelier. He found himself better able to comprehend the theories of the heavy-metal refugee chess-master. He reciprocated Lady Juanita’s theories with questions and critique, and their matches became considerably longer. They established a routine in which they played every Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning before Bumi’s shift. Their matches stretched from days into weeks. Bumi drew no closer to victory. He merely delayed defeat further each time with the discussion of sweet ideas.

  It had been many years since Bumi had encountered new ideas. His peers at the restaurant provided information from home but instead of analyzing events in detail they quickly decided new developments were either good or bad. In Lady Juanita’s world, everything was bad, devious and evil. There was no good news, only an ingenious ability to twist all information into a complex set of theories explaining why life is shit.

  Bumi was thrilled by this unrestricted negativity. Lady Juanita’s theories were the work of a miss-wired mind and twisted life experience, so although they bore no resemblance to reality as Bumi understood it, he was pleased to have found someone who shared his utter disdain for what God had created. The exchange of ideas, no matter how fantastical, reminded Bumi of the times when he was closest to happiness: back in the Warung Bali with his fellow coffee shop revolutionaries. He wasn’t happy stewing in the impure stench of Lady Juanita, but he was at least able to enjoy the nostalgia of happiness.